Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  I do wish you’d come here on one of your lightning tours. You just might over the next three months.

  Love from Elizabeth and from me,

  Bruce

  That summer, Chatwin visited Ronda in Spain where his friend Magouche Phillips (now living with Xan Fielding) had bought a house. ‘It was raining,’ Magouche remembers. ‘I was looking out of the window. “Why, why, why do I have to put myself on this perch?” Suddenly I saw Bruce. He just appeared through the apple orchard, like an angel.’

  At the suggestion of Magouche, Chatwin called on the British writer Gerald Brenan (1894-1987), best known for The Spanish Labyrinth, who lived at Alhaurin-el-Grande – ‘the Garden of Eden, though with Adam much older than he ought to be’. At first, the two men hit it off. Brenan wrote to Chatwin: ‘I so much enjoyed your visit – it was a great stimulus though I felt terribly envious of your travels.Travel gives immediate pleasure, writing only satisfaction – or dissatisfaction. But it’s the combination I should like to have had.’ Chatwin, in turn, fell in love with a small house in Pitres: one of many that he would contemplate buying over the next two decades. In Kasmin’s opinion: ‘Bruce’s biggest problem was where to be. He never knew where to be. It was always somewhere else.’

  To Gerald Brenan

  In the Lot | as from Holwell Farm | 26 August [1976]

  Dear Gerald and Lynda422 and Lars,

  This morning my voice returned. (You must forgive the whirlwind of conversation). All the same I wish I were back in the Alpujaras. I’ve always found this part of France suffocating and depressing, one’s thought leaden, and head hanging dead weight like a pumpkin.

  At Malaga airport there was no unbooked seat for days, so I went out for the day to Alhaurin-el-Grande, and in the evening Zalin423 put me on the night train to Madrid. He is, as you say, tormented by Vietnam, and I think it will be years before the horror of it heals.

  Next morning I rested in the Prado in the room of black Riberas,424 the least frequented room in the museum, and after lunch took the milk train for Bordeaux. On crossing the frontier I asked some German boys to make sure I didn’t miss the station and woke up with the light and the outskirts of Paris. The next day I spent getting back down here and the whole journey cost rather more than an airfare, but at least I didn’t have to set foot on a plane.

  I loved the house at Alhaurin-el-Grande, so cheerful and workmanlike, but the Alpujaras are definitely for me. Elizabeth sounded delighted at the prospect of terraces, shivering water and Muslim architecture. Providing the price is within the margin we discussed, I think we’d better buy it. If we sold Gloucestershire and moved to Spain, we’d have to find something bigger but I’m sure we could sell it later, and if not, at that figure, it’s not the end of the world.

  To my immense relief Jonathan Cape have taken my book on Patagonia;425 so I shall be taken up revising and rewriting for the next month or two. But if things came to a crisis, Elizabeth could perhaps find a cheap fare to Malaga and straighten things out. She is far more competent about property than I am. We have the money set aside in an American bank account, so we can by-pass the labyrinths of the British Treasury.

  Do please, if it’s not too inconvenient find out the price, but do not on any account, put yourselves to any further trouble. You must promise this. If it falls through or is unavailable, we shall come back in the late spring of next year and look for another.

  I shall send you Sinyavsky, Isaac Babel and the Prose of Mandelstam. Don’t order them yourselves.426 Thank you – all of you. Bruce

  On 6 September 1976 Brenan wrote to inform Chatwin that he had visited Chatwin’s ‘dream house’ in Pitres the day before, but the owner was not yet prepared to sell.

  To Gerald Brenan

  Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 21 September 1976

  Dear Gerald,

  Though I’m sad the little dream house No 1 isn’t for sale immediately, perhaps it’s all for the best. Elizabeth and I will come out and prospect further sometime in the fairly near future. After all, one can’t expect to find the ideal place in a single afternoon.427

  I am sitting in London, working over some unresolved sections for my book, before embarking on a new project. Some years ago I went to a place called Ouidah on the slave coast of Dahomey and met members of a family called de Souza, now totally black. The original de Souza was a Portuguese peasant, who went to Bahia, became captain of the Portuguese fort on the slave coast and successively the leading slave-dealer, the Viceroy of the King, and one of the richest men in Africa. At one point he had 83 slave ships and 2 frigates built in the Philadelphia dockyard, but he could never leave his slave barracoon and his hundred odd black women in Ouidah. The family went mulatto and are now feticheurs. A de Souza is high priest of the Python Fetish, which Richard Burton saw on his Embassy to Dahomey in the 1860’s. At that time it was in decline but, since independence, has taken a new lease of life. Tom Maschler of Cape’s says I should go and try and chronicle the gradual blackening of the family. I’ll probably leave for Dahomey in November and then go to Brazil for a month in March, returning through Spain.

  I hope you’ve got the Sinyavsky, Babel and Mandelstam by now.

  Love to Lynda, Bruce

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE VICEROY OF OUIDAH: 1976-80

  On 25 November 1976 James Lees-Milne wrote in his diary after visiting the London Library: ‘Ran into Bruce Chatwin in St James Square, overjoyed that he had handed in his book on Patagonia.’ Chatwin was now free to concentrate on the story of the Brazilian slave millionaire Dom Francisco Felix de Souza. Meanwhile, his cousin Monica continued to express concern about what exactly from her father’s journal he planned to include.

  To Monica Barnett

  as from Holwell Farm | 8 December 1976

  My dear Monica,

  A few lines to keep you abreast of developments here. By the time, though, this reaches you I’ll be in West Africa in a country called the Republic of Benin to do some research on a book about a slave trader.

  Patagonia is finished and delivered, down to the last Spanish accent (which I hope are right). Reasons of space have obviously restricted the amount of C[harles]. A. M[ilward] material I could – and would like to have used, but this is all to the good. I have printed verbatim in the first person the story of the boys getting lost overboard (my literary friends say it’s better than Conrad) and two others The Bushmen dancing and the Indians’ Canoe, both v. short, about 2pp each. The others I have duly compressed, sometimes to a line or two and put into the Third Person.

  The book ends with the following:

  ‘This book would not have been written without Charley Milward’s daughter Monica Barnett, of Lima, who allowed me access to her father’s papers and sea-stories. This was particularly generous since she was writing her own biography in which the stories will appear in full.’

  This leaves absolutely no room for question about matters of copyright.

  In December 1976 Chatwin flew to West Africa with Kasmin to research his new book. Dahomey had changed name since his first visit in 1972 and was now the Marxist Republic of Benin. A curfew began at 11 p.m. and officials of President Kérékou were wary of foreigners unless they were North Korean.

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Abomey | Benin | 9 December 1976

  K[asmin] & I have been walking round the north of the country making a preliminary tour. We have had an audience with the king – born in the year of Burton’s visit in 1863.428 The story is wonderful, already forming in my mind, but I’ve hardly touched on it yet. I think it will have to be written in the high style of Salammbo. If you liked & could afford it you can come out in Feb for 3 weeks – fare to Cotonou £320. I will have lodgings in Pto. Novo hopefully, but it is hot sticky and I’ll be working.

  To Francis Wyndham

  Parakou | Benin | 29 December 1976

  Teacher’s at under £2 a bottle. La lutte continue. B

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

&n
bsp; c/o Sebastian de Souza | P.B.40 | Porto Novo | Rep du Benin | 14 January 1977

  Maxine,429

  Here am I sweltering in a room I’ve rented from an aged doctor in a street lined with Portuguese houses built by creole nabobs who returned from Bahia in the 1850’s. It is infernally sticky and I have to confess the whole of this part of the trip is something of a trial – climatically. I went to see Lynda Price’s brother430 (that is, Gerald Brenan’s girl friend) in Ibadan in Nigeria. That country has diabolical energy which one can’t but admire, however impossible it may be to exist there. A room in Lagos costs about £40 a night at the cheapest reasonable standard. Dreadful English misunderstood nursery food dinner 431 at least £10 per head. Here is quite expensive if you go in for French food but otherwise not so.

  Hope K[asmin] has rung you up with details of our run-around. Quite exhausting because one could never tell when he would begin one of his British sense-of-fair play outbursts. One or two near scrapes but he was an excellent fellow traveller and we both enjoyed our little tour. Saw the game park in the south. Beautiful but an irritating atmosphere in the hotel.

  At Ibadan I met the famous Pierre Verger432 Afro-Brazilian scholar of encyclopaedic knowledge but little practical use. Tight with information. A fantastical old queen, having a tiff with his Yoruba boyfriend.

  I’ve been reading some Balzac and think the only way to treat de S[ouza] is to write a straight Balzacian account of the family beginning with a description of the place and then switching back to him and writing through to the present. Quite a mouthful.

  Frankly I don’t now see any point in your coming out because it isn’t a joyride and the only way is to get it over as soon as I can.

  I’m a bit alarmed about my affairs with Sotheby’s, somewhat in desperation I borrowed £1500 on a whole lot of my little things – and frankly F[elicity] N[icolson] thought she promised one thing and then asked for more things later. I don’t mind selling the haematite frog and the Eskimo man – if I have to – but the others I do rather mind about especially if there’s going to be money coming in from the book. At any rate I couldn’t let myself be put off doing this for the sake of a few things. But I leave it to you to do what you think. Perhaps we ought to protect them by saving them up. Feathers are now at K[asmin]’s.

  But, O dear, what are we going to do about the farm? I really can’t stick the Alistair433 situation again, and as you know, find it very hard to work there. On the other hand, travelling about the world makes one less and less feel like quitting England – which I think will get better not worse. But I do think we have to be comfortable there.

  Let me know how it was in N.Y. With the market crowing outside my window, I envy you . . . Rambling letter written in the light of a guttering lamp. Must plunge under the mosquito net.

  XXXX B

  P.S. Going with Sebastian de Souza434 to a football match in Togo and will write from there again with more news. Please tell Charles Tomlinson that I had no success in getting anything on Blacks in the French Revolution. Perhaps he should look at the career of Toussaint L’ Ouverture.

  On the way to the football match Chatwin was caught up in a coup. Mercenaries had landed at Cotonou in a DC-7 and shot their way through the western suburbs with the intention of overthrowing President Kérékou’s Marxist state. ‘By eleven the President reported a “glorious victory” for the Benin Armed Forces with news of the enemy fleeing towards the marshes “en catastrophe”.’ A “witchhunt” for foreigners took place in which Chatwin and several hundred others were taken to Camp Ghézo and strip-searched. Three days later, he flew to the Côte D’Ivoire from where he rang Kasmin, who wrote down their conversation:

  ‘Friday 21 January. Woken at 7.30 this morning by Bruce calling from Abidjan. He escaped from Cotonou yesterday and related his experiences during the mysterious coup of last Sunday. Was arrested, roughed up and locked up with hundreds of other Europeans and some blacks. Some shootings, much brutality and chaos. Was the coup genuine or a stage effect to strengthen Kérékou’s position as saviour of the country and keep alive the notion of an imperialist enemy eager to attack the Marxist state. His story of hiding in a de Souza closet and then at the Gendarmerie a mercenary type being brought in with gun and dressed in camouflaged combat suit who transpired to be the Fr Ambassador found while out on a partridge shoot and the Amazon who kicked him for being slow at undressing on command. Poor B was worried whether he was wearing underpants or not.’

  From Abidjan, Chatwin flew to Monrovia to catch a KLM flight to Rio de Janeiro – ‘penniless (for my travellers’ cheques had gone), a bit bruised about the face, and with a very sore big toe which a lady corporal had stamped on’.

  To John Kasmin

  c/o Brit Vice-Consulate | Salvador da Bahia | Brazil | 7 March 1977

  Dear K,

  Necessity will damn well have to be the mother of invention. Everything’s gone wrong! Where was it we were hexed? Somewhere I have it in my mind you said we’d been hexed. Well, not only the arrest, the visa withdrawn, the traveller’s cheques stolen, the bronchitis (from the Beach Hotel of Cotonou), the bags sent to Cairo instead of Rio, the ten-day pointless wait, now Tom’s proof of Patagonia has got lost in the post between Rio and Bahia just when I have to go off north.

  I have to say Brazil is very fascinating. Not very taken with the big cities to which I have been chained, but last night for instance I went to a candomblé in a teneiro (fetish house) way up a mountain with the ‘daughters of the god’ trance dancing in colossal white lace crinolines and the boys – girlie boys – in silver and lace all shuddering as the God Shango435 hit them through the shoulder blade and one boy twisting and whirling off the platform his silver thunderbolts glittering down the mountain and coming back up again and collapsing into the arms of the ‘mother’ – a middle aged white lady with spectacles, hair in a scarf and the air of a bank manager’s secretary.

  As and when I get the proof I am going north through the sertão – cactus scrub – to San Luis de Marañón, where Ghézo’s mother Agontimé was sold into slavery and was got back by de Souza. In the meantime I’m kicking my heels in the country round Bahia, walking round crumbling plantation houses. The architecture is wonderful. 18th century Rococo with genuinely Chinese overtones brought direct from Macao whose towns look like the willow pattern. Bahia itself is rather a bore, one of those self-congratulatory places like San Francisco.

  I may meet E. and her mother for a week in Spain or Portugal in April and then come back to England. I think I’ll sit out the summer at the farm because this will need a lot of other men’s books if it’s to be anything – though I’m still taken with the story. Have traced Domingos José Martin’s family and will in Bahia. An interesting figure is a man called Joaquim Pereira Marinho – Martin’s and de Souza’s banker – who made his first fortune in charque salt dried beef and was known as a carne seco who died in the 1880’s in a colossal palace, a Viscount of the Empire. (The de Souza’s are convinced they still have a fortune in Bahia).436 Pereira Marinho in turn was a cousin of the biggest family in N.E. Brazil, the Garcia d’Avilas who – from 1550 on were the biggest cattle barons the world ever knew with ranches stretching 1000 miles. Their house is in ruins but still standing – a palace of granite blocks in a coco plantation. The only medieval castle in the Americas. In the souzala or old slave quarter the blacks are all de Souzas!

  But then everyone is a de Souza or has de Souza cousins in Brazil.

  Much love. Be good. Hope your love life is working out. See you all summer.

  B

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  c/o British Vice-Consulate | Salvador da Bahia | Brazil | 9 March 1977

  Dear E.

  Oh, I hope this new arrangement works out. Probably because I have had to kick my heels round Bahia so long, I am heartily sick of it. Full of folklore, bad art, intellectuals in search of Atlantis and smart folks who go to candomblé in jangling earrings. I am staying with the missionaries of the Britis
h Church and when got down I retire into a damp retreat in the graveyard where I read while marble personifications of sleep mourn our English gentlemen victims of yellow fever.

  I don’t promise Portugal or Spain until a. the wretched proof comes b. I don’t find something wonderful in the province of Pianhy or Marañón. In any case I’ll phone you again 1 week before you go i.e. round the 23rd. Incidentally, I do think you’re going very early for Spain. You remember how perishing it was when we were in Madrid. Also the weather in April is liable to be tricky in Andalusia. Downpours for Holy Week in Seville. Never been so cold as in Ronda in April. You may be lucky, but I would have left it till 2nd half of the month and then go from Madrid to Aula, Salamanca, Trujillo and the Extremaduran towns (I imagine you are hiring a car) then to the south Cordoba, Seville, Granada. Don’t miss Yuste, Charles V’s retreat or the monasteries of Guadalupe with the Zurbarans – there’s an equally good series in Cadiz. You shouldn’t miss Salamanca either – cold or no cold. The best city in Spain. Old cathedral out of this world.